Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday November 25, 2009 @10:39AM
from the hindsight-and-voyeurism dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Wikileaks is preparing to release 500,000 intercepted pager messages from a 24-hour period encompassing the September 11 terrorist attacks. The messages show emergency services springing into action and computer systems sending automated messages as buildings collapse. Wikileaks implies this data came from an organised collection effort."

Every conspircay theorist in the world just simultaneously orgasmed. All those messages to pick through; I'm sure they'll be able to prove it was the US Government/Al-Qaeda/Joseph Fritzel/The Cookie Monster/Scientologists all along.

Every conspircay theorist in the world just simultaneously orgasmed. All those messages to pick through; I'm sure they'll be able to prove it was the US Government/Al-Qaeda/Joseph Fritzel/The Cookie Monster/Scientologists all along.

The NORAD tapes, which were released long ago proved that there was a conspiracy by The Pentagon to lie to the 9/11 Commission and the American people. The 9/11 Commission had a closed meeting deciding whether or not to charge Air Force officials with perjury but chose not to because "it wouldn't be good for the country."

John Farmer, senior counsel on the 9/11 Commission said, "at some level of the government, at some point in time...there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened [during 9/11]"

6 of the 10 Commissioners have come out saying that they were lied to and that the report is not accurate.http://patriotsquestion911.com/ [patriotsquestion911.com]

“More than one-quarter of all footnotes in the 9/11 Report refer to CIA interrogations of al Qaeda operatives subjected to the now-controversial interrogation techniques,” writes former NBC producer Robert Windrem in The Daily Beast. [thedailybeast.com] “In fact, information derived from the interrogations was central to the 9/11 Report’s most critical chapters, those on the planning and execution of the attacks.”

We've been lied to about 9/11 from day one. It needs to be investigated further. If 6 out of the 10 Commissioners are distancing themselves from the report by saying they were lied to something isn't right. Burying your head deeper into the sand won't help.

If there was a conspiracy to find about 9/11, what do you think it would turn out to be?

A. A concerted effort by the Government and Department of Defence, and related military bodies conspiring together to launch an attack on the US people in order to further the aims of the Government and selected private corporations and individuals.

Or...

B. A concerted effort by members of the Government and Department of Defence, and related military bodies to cover up their own inadequecies in being able to deal with an attack by a small number of persons against several targets using simplistic weapons, causing a massive over reaction over the next few years, and resulting in the inability of the largest military might in the world to subdue a country that has barely hit the 19th Century.

Yes, there probably was a lie surrounding 9/11, but its almost certainly not the juicy one people are fantasising about...

Read the Project for a New American Century's statement of principles here [newamericancentury.org]. Now read the PNAC letter to Clinton on Iraq here [newamericancentury.org]. Note that Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Jeb are all big supporters. Now read about their plans here [newamericancentury.org].

The choice quote is: "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."

My theory is that they had intelligence stating that the attack was going

Very similar to Pearl Harbor, no? The administrator knew something was coming, and indirectly wanted it to happen to get public opinion in favor of entering the war. There is even evidence that it was known that Pearl Harbor was the target and the date, as all the high-value ships were conveniently pulled out of port shortly beforehand. All the ships lost were low value ships due to be decommissioned in the near future. There is even evidence that the Japanese coded transmissions had been deciphered so

If you wanted the USA to have the tallest building in the world again, where would you put it? Would you build it in some developing city that couldn't support the occupancy of the building to make money? Montgomery Alabama? Little Rock Arkansas? No....

You would build it in the most populace cities. The largest cities that can support that kind of building and still make money off of it are all out of land. So, what is someone to do... Knock down some of the existing buildings and build

Option B sounds pretty plausible. It also sounds like something that should be properly investigate. Option A sounds possible, although requires a lot more competence from the DoD than I would expect, and should probably be investigated just in case it is true.

"When errors can be attributed to incompetence or malice, it's always more likely to be the former." While this is generally true, it is important to take things in context. 9/11 started two wars. The average cost of those wars for the last 8 years far has been about a quarter of a million dollars PER MINUTE. That is a total of almost $1 Trillion SO FAR. You don't cover up mistakes by making bigger, outrageously expensive, ones. That is money that came from you and me and went into the pockets of the

The government reaction after 9/11 fits exactly along the lines of A. It increased spending, created new bureaucracy, curtailed civil liberties, and ignored the huge issues facing government at the time (ie.. $2.3trillion unaccounted for at the Pentagon on 9/10/01).

Further, the reaction of government to ignore any realistic discussion about the events of 9/11 looks damning.

Stop it. Just stop it. Not only are you a coward by posting anonymously, but the nine mile debris field has been debunked REPEATEDLY, including by police officers on the scene [debunk911myths.org].

The nine mile debris field consisted of bits of paper which may or may not have been from the flight when it impacted in the field.

Further, that nine mile figure is bogus. People used MapQuest to find the distance between the crash site and the supposed debris field. Sure, nine miles if you drive by road, but roughly 2.5 miles in a straight line.

The debris field WAS NOT composed of engine parts, seats, body parts or anything else heavier than a piece of paper.

Your friend is also an idiot as there are nearly a dozen eyewitnesses [debunk911myths.org] to the plane coming down, some of which watched the plane, intact, nose dive into the ground. Had the plane been shot down, it would have displayed some semblance of damage including smoke and/or fire trailing from it. Not one eyewitness described seeing anything of the sort.

A friend of mine works at Center, and he told me that the air force shot down flight 93.

No he doesn't. Its not called 'Center' In the air pilots refer the the control center they are currently being directed by as 'center' for radio purposes, but thats where it ends.

There isn't one 'center'. There are several around the country for handling that general area of the country, they all have names, employees don't refer to themselves as 'working at Center' They work at something like the Air Traffic Control

In what context were these quotes made? What was the nature of the lies? Were they covering up their own incompetent response (like, say, the FAA taking too long to contact NORAD)? Or were they of a much larger scope (like trying to hide a missile attack on the pentagon)? Quite a bit of difference between those two...

It's mostly because you have a gross misunderstanding of how the military works. When something gets fucked up, somebody is responsible for the fuck up. While that statement at first makes you say, "Well, duh!" you need to understand how it functions in the military. That statement is an absolute truth. There are no "whoops, nobody's fault" moments in the military. If something fucked up, SOMEBODY fucked up, and therefore, SOMEBODY will pay. Usually an officer is in charge, a relatively minor fuck up m

WTC 7 was NOT a hardened building. It was constructed in the early 80s as a run of the mill office building. The only thing unique about it was the unusual arrangement of the load-bearing members. This was needed because the thing was constructed on top of a massive utility vault. The Emergency Command Center was shoehorned into the building and not everyone thought the location made any sense for obvious reasons. (It was located there AFTER the '93 bombing)

I'm sure this will lead to rational debate, as well as this information being added to our view of those tragic events as a whole and will finally lay to bed some of the misconceptions that have surrounded the events of 9/11, rather than becoming the source for thousands of snippets of information that will get used in barely contextualized, ill-thought out, and poorly worded conspiracy theories.

The conspiracy theories are already full of thousands of snippets of stuff, this new data isn't going to change anyone's mind. People who want to believe in a conspiracy will find "proof" in whatever information they get, so it doesn't really matter what's available.

Basically, there's already so many barely contextualized, ill-thought out, and poorly worded conspiracy theories out there that it doesn't really matter if this new data spawns a few more. I think most people have already chosen a side on the wh

This seems to be a really good move on the part of Wikileaks. Its one of those things, where in the digital age, that information lasts for a long time, but I think the significance here is that this data was collected within a day of the attacks. What this does is give us a clearer picture of lots of things, including emergency response methods and efficiency, the way people react to catastrophic events, and information that may have previously been unknown, and things like that. There has been a lot of controversy surrounding Sep 11. and simple data being released to the public is always a good thing. Yes, there will be both ends of the extremist section, both conspiracy theorists and their counterparts, who may try to find specific data to backup their preconceived theories, but its still a good thing. Just browsing over to the TFA and their shortened excerpt, I found one very interesting message.."WTC HAS BEEN HIT BY AN AIRPLANE AND A BOMB." This does nothing as far as credibility and in situations like that people are known to panic and see and hear things that aren't there, but regardless, it will be interesting to see where this leads. Data by itself sometimes can be useless, but in context can have implications you don't expect. My personal opinions are far to complex to list here, but people should learn how to use logic and think for themselves.

I'd question the ethics of it. The very existence of this database is of huge political and social importance, thus falling under Wikileaks' remit, but by putting it into the public domain they're infringing the privacy of the citizens involved even further. You can bet all the TLAs, not to mention police forces, lawyers, insurance companies, and so on are having fun with it now it's in public view.

Wikileaks is simply an outlet for sensitive information. So what you're implying is that their privacy wasn't infringed by whichever entity collected the information, but by Wikileaks? That doesn't make any sense. I do see your point, but I think the potential benefits by far outweigh the cons of such a release. Now that the data is out there, nothing can be done to get it back. On top of this, Wikileaks has some serious credibility when it comes to their methods and what and when they decide to release, I'

All the TLAs almost certainly had access to it already. Putting it in the public domain means that the public now has more of a clue about the amount of information the TLAs have on them. If it leads to more opposition to things like the USAPATRIOT Act then it will have served a beneficial purpose.

I'd question the ethics of it. The very existence of this database is of huge political and social importance, thus falling under Wikileaks' remit, but by putting it into the public domain they're infringing the privacy of the citizens involved even further. You can bet all the TLAs, not to mention police forces, lawyers, insurance companies, and so on are having fun with it now it's in public view.

Exactly- and especially true when you browse through and see messages like " " Andre-are you at work today? Gimme a call - 301-555-5555. Gerry". (number obviously changed in my repost) There's no doubt that these people will be targeted for 9/11-related scams and other obnoxious behavior in short order. You think Gerry's not already getting a call from someone looking to cash in, or who just thinks they're being funny?

If this list were filtered so that it was just automated systems, non-personal, etc , that's fine -- but doing it in this way is just opening the door for all the abuse and stupidity that we're capable of. As it is - it's a gross breach of privacy, published in a way that ensures that there will be no accountability for any abuse of personal information found in it.

Text pagers are usualy carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults to their operators as the World Trade Center collapsed.
The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its revelation will lead to a more nuanced understanding of the event and its tragic consequences.

Text pagers are also carried by support personnel, executives, grunts, everyday people. It's nice how they point out the "official" messages but leave out that these are outnumbered by "call me, are you ok?!" style messages, along with things like account numbers, private phone numbers, etc.

The text of the messages indicates that it's also not strictly sent by people who were directly involved - so is this just a dump of NYC area pages from nearby cell towers? What filtering do

Probably 'network failure to server A,' 'network failure to server B,' 'system is down,' 'UPS power offline'. It depends on how the server is sending the data. A lot will use email to SMS relays, which will stop working as soon as the network goes down, but some may be using built-in GSM hardware (GSM transmitters that can send SMS are pretty cheap) so that they can notify the admin if the network goes down. In this case, they will keep sending until the server is disconnected from the UPS or flattened

Actually, I was working at Reuters in London at the time and the first we knew of the disaster was an automated alert from our trading system saying that Merrylls and APM had gone fully offline (these types of systems very very rarely go offline). At the same moment, one of the data feeds went DR (DataScope I think) - it had its DR facility in the other tower and so only lasted a short time before going off for good.

2001-09-11 10:20:40 Skytel [002840776] C ALPHA Hi, I need you to call me to tell me you are ok. Everyone is calling me and is very worried about you! If you can't get thru, can you send me an email or a fax or something. Just worried about you and wish you

I thought pagers used the cell networks a la text messages; indeed, I thought a pager was essentially a dedicated text message device.

I was in NYC on Sept 11 and the only thing that *was* working that day was the Internet...phones, both land line and cell were unavailable. We were trying to contact my brother-in-law who lived in Manhattan (we were in Brooklyn) and every phone we tried, including the pay phone down the street (still had 'em back then...) gave us the "fast busy signal", indicating "We didn't even try to make your call..."

So we spent the rest of the day IM'ing people as that was the only way to verify who was where. Bad times...bad times.

There were pagers before cell networks were widespread. Later pagers may have worked with cell networks, but there were (are?) pager networks which were much stronger & reliable than anything the cell networks provide.

I knew a number of people who carried a pager for on-call duties (and this is just 5 years ago) because while cell phones didn't work inside their houses, pagers did.

In those days most pager networks were separate and distinct from the mobile phone networks (and were on different frequencies, too). My two-way Motorola Skytel pager worked everywhere. Even today I cannot find a comparable mobile phone service with the coverage and reliability of the pagers that I cannot carry anymore.

That's partially true.I also lived and worked in Manhattan during 9/11.

There was a cellphone tower on top of one of the two towers which killed cellphones for the lower region of the island, but cellphones were working just fine as low as 35th st. I called my parents back home from my apartment on 91st street and spoke with a co-worker who was already at work and watching the events unfold from the corner of 35th and 7th.

You are definitely correct about cellphones not working down in the financial district

"I thought I'd give the passengers a treat and fly over Manhattan before I land. Don't tell ATC!" And, a short while later "There's smoke coming from one of the WTC towers. Going to do a flyby before I land and see if I can get some good pictures!"

2001-09-11 08:58:33 Skytel [002399634] A ALPHA Initial reports indictate that AAL11, B767, after initial hijacking on flight from BOS-LAX, has crashed into the side of the World Trade Center in NY. ATCSCC/bl

That was an insane amount of detail at a point when everyone else was going: "It's possible something may have happened somewhere."

Yes, I am a New Yorker.
Yes, I was in the city that day.
My Cellphone was useless, probably due to a combination of losing a major relay point, and everybody in town trying to use their phones at the same time. Landlines were flakey (probably due to losing a major chunk of the infrastructure).
My Obsolete and Archaic text pager kept working.
(I wonder if the pager "I'm OK, R U OK?"messages I exchanged with my sister are in this archive?)

I searched a whole bunch of these for the word "fuck" and couldn't find a single instance. I find it hard to believe that nobody got a page from their girl/boy friend saying why don't you come over and fuck me or a message saying holy fuck a plane just hit the WTC.

Not true. They're RF devices and suffer the same limitations as any other radio receiver. With most pagers, they are not bidirectional and so if you are in a dead zone the person sending the message does not get any notification that the delivery failed or was delayed.

Pagers can be more reliable than TM. And a lot of people turn off their cell phone when they are sleeping. Ringing cell phones often aren't loud enough to wake you up anyway. Not everyone has a cell phone. (I don't) A lot of automated systems are still only able to do a broadcast-style alert to multiple pagers, not text messaging. (volunteer fire departments are good examples) Pagers can run a month or more on a single AA battery which increases their reliability. Lots of reasons to stick with pagers.

Obviously this depends on culture. I've never met anyone who had a pager, I've never seen a pager in real life or heard of anyone using one outside the US. Text messaging on the other hand have been in common use since early 2001, and everyone has a mobile phone, if not for any other reason, then because it is many times cheaper than a fixed phone if you don't use a phone often.

You've never known anybody who is on call? SMS is unreliable, and if you're paying someone to be on-call, you want their service to be reliable. You don't want the message "Critical production server down, administrator needed" to be delayed 15 minutes because of some SMS issue. It doesn't matter nearly as much if "LOL, at movies" gets delayed, but the on-call message can literally be worth thousands of dollars per minute it is delayed. Of course on-call folks have cell phones too, but the pager tends to be the first method of communication employed.

At one place I worked years ago, we used pagers. As cell phones became more popular, we stared switching over to them. Every once in a while, we'd test to see which ones worked better. Text messages emailed to the phones were usually faster than the alphanumeric pagers. In time, we ditched the pagers entirely, since they were slower to receive, and we felt silly carrying around too many devices.

For completeness of coverage, the messages were sent to 5 different people via two methods each. Usually it was email and phone. If there was an emergency, and no admins checked in, the phone calls started going out. Most events were handled in 5 minutes, even if the primary person was unavailable. That wasn't bad considering not everything happened during normal working hours. Actually, most emergencies didn't happen during normal working hours. That would have made them too easy.:)

I have a pager as a workplace emergency responder. I too have the messages sent as text to my (private) cell phone, and I receive them as a work email.

In general my phone and the email arrive simultaneously, followed about a minute later by the pager.

That said, at least once the phone text message stopped working when my cell phone provider changed something. At our last ERT group meeting last week, when we did a test page, at least two members did not get the texts (including one who had the week prior d

Unreliable as in you get no guarantees if and when a message will actually be delivered. Try to find a carrier anywhere that offers you a contract with an SLA on SMS delivery.
Granted, you won't often run into problems with SMS, but if you are bound by an SLA with a customer, you'd better have your underpinning contracts (yay for ITIL terminology) at the same level as that SLA.

SMS is more reliable in this sense than a pager message. If a receiving mobile is out of radio range then it will be buffered for retransmit. Pagers are receive-only devices and don't send acknowledgements, so if they are out of range when the message is sent the message is permanently lost. My father used to have a pager but his company switched to sending SMS because at least then he'd get messages late, while previously he would sometimes never get them.

The problems you experienced at new years are because of network congestion, and that can happen at other times as well. I sent my girlfriend an SMS last Tuesday at lunch time and it only arrived on Friday or Saturday night. Cellular networks occasionally have problems which could lead to SMSs being delayed. While you might be used to SMSs arriving instantly, they very often do not.

The biggest delay I have seen was about 2 hours. I sent the message on January 1st 00:00 and the recipient received it around 02:00 the same night. Though sometimes the messages are lost on the same day, but during the rest 364 days of the year they arrive almost instantly.

Usually SMS arrives within a few seconds and I can also choose to receive a confirmation that the SMS was delivered.

While you might be used to SMSs arriving instantly, they very often do not.

This, too, seems to be a peculiarly US problem. I've heard of many many more lost and delayed SMSs in the US than in Europe. Perhaps that's because Europe has been making significant use of text messaging for far longer, so the systems there are now more reliable?

Perhaps US users just have lower expectations, so cell networks can get away with such things?

I'm clueless as to how pagers work, but SMS does not have guaranteed delivery.

Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#GSM

"Message delivery is best effort, so there are no guarantees that a message will actually be delivered to its recipient and delay or complete loss of a message is not uncommon, particularly when sending between networks."

I've never met anyone who had a pager, I've never seen a pager in real life or heard of anyone using one outside the US.

Your experience must be limited to geographical areas with pervasive cell network coverage.

I live in an area of NH with moderate coverage, but prefer to head up to the mountains for R&R. But I'm on-call, so I carry a pager, it works nearly everywhere (cell phone start working again well above tree-line).

I use procmail to duplicate messages to pager + SMS - between the two coverage is

I'm wearing a pager right now. When our engineers are on-call, we get pagers to wear to notify us of any problems. The pagers tend to be more reliable than cell phones. I can get a signal in places where my phone has no bars.

On certain days, my father would always have a pager with him because different psychologists took the same pager home on different days.

This made one contact number which would always wake someone qualified to help in an emergency.

I have no idea how many times I saw my dad stop dinner to go to the nearest payphone (mainly before the widespread use of cell phones, mind you, although this system is still used) to check to make sure the lat

Just to add to this, a lot of EMS services here in North America use this because newer pagers can include the EMS TONE system for responses. Including in vibrate mode(using pulses and buzzes) if you're at a conference inside a building and you have to have the pager on, but tone off.

Tech related: intercepted private pager messages from a variety of sources. Someone managed to collate these en-masse and distribute them.Politically related (Slashdot has a politics section): suggestion of interception and storage of pager messages on a grand scale beyond that needed for operational reasons (this is 24-hours worth, don't forget, from several sources).Privacy related: A release of otherwise private information, including private communications between ordinary people, presumably gathered direct from telco's, to a website known for doing that with politically-sensitive material. If nothing else, this shows you where your "private communications" end up when you're texting something erotic to your girlfriend... not "analysed", not "anonymised", just saved onto a disk somewhere at the telco for a random person to collect and leak to the Internet.

I think it's relevant and I have zero interest in 9/11, conspiracy theories, or even most of the things the US does.